


every night sews a chandrilan shroud

by the_garbage_will_do



Series: rewired [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brendol Hux's A+ Parenting, Dreams, Force-Sensitive Brendol Hux, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Jedi Mind Tricks (Star Wars), M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mythology References, Possibly Pre-Slash, Reconditioning, References to Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-26 19:17:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20394808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_garbage_will_do/pseuds/the_garbage_will_do
Summary: One missile malfunctioned, and Brendol Hux rose to the top of the First Order’s military with Kylo Ren kept uneasily at his side. The ghost of a redhead boy haunted them both.(Can be read without knowledge of the previous story, though the effect may be quite different.)





	every night sews a chandrilan shroud

**Author's Note:**

> Plays fast and loose with the canon timeline. Borrows from non-film sources like the comics but doesn’t comply fully with them.
> 
> Written for Star Wars Multishippers' Armitage Hux Appreciation month!
> 
> Set at the same time as the previous story, but told from Kylo's POV.

_ You will stay near Hux. Do not remove your mask for anyone. _

Snoke’s words echoed long after they had parted, long after Kylo’s shuttle had lowered its wings and glided smoothly into the void of space. It charted a direct course to the _ Finalizer_, a Star Destroyer controlled by the First Order’s preeminent military official, General Brendol Hux.

.

By the time Kylo disembarked he had donned his full regalia, his crisp clean cowl draped in folds over his helmet. With every step he took the black flaps of his cloak rippled and his boots clanked loud on the Destroyer’s ungiving floors. The effect ought to have chilled the spine of every onlooker. He ought to have felt the terror of his presence rippling through every mind in the room. 

The stormtroopers gathered for this peculiar welcome ceremony didn’t seem to notice.

He strode past their eerily neat lines to the general himself.

“Lord Ren.”

Kylo stopped before him, a few inches too close for propriety, and stared down at him. Hux returned the look mildly.

“General.”

For a taut moment they appraised each other. Kylo took in the wrinkles set deep in Brendol Hux’s fleshy face, the uniformly silver hair, the bland hollow of his stare. The durasteel ramparts pulled tight around his psyche. They shone in Kylo’s mind’s eye, smooth walls towering high above him and plunging far below. They felt mechanical, carefully engineered, wholly without flaws for a mind-reader to grip.

Without moving, Kylo reached back out to the troopers. No walls hid their minds. When he pried further he found they had nothing to hide, as their thoughts focused on the current moment to the exclusion of all else. Luke would have been proud.

Kylo scoffed. He offered no explanation, though Hux arched an eyebrow at him.

“Let us proceed with our schedule.” Hux turned sharply on his heel and exited. 

After a moment of shock Kylo leapt forward, striving to claim the space at his side.

.

The _ Finalizer _ hung suspended in space, a Resurgent-class Star Destroyer redesigned fully since Imperial days. Kylo left his quarters and roamed the intricate system of halls at random, attempting to acquaint himself with the ship. He drove deep into the labyrinth, looking for some gem at the center, some subtle shift in shape or color among all the right angles and flat gray surfaces.

The sheer size of the ship defied comprehension. When it jumped to lightspeed Kylo missed it, the lurch dampened completely by the massive stabilizers. He didn’t notice the displacement until he arrived at a rare window and saw the blue of hyperspace smeared across the glass.

He kept walking. Every hall was sleek and sterile, indistinguishable from the next. Stranger yet, the stormtroopers he encountered on the way also seemed indistinguishable. They barely glanced at him, though his bulk and non-regulation armor should have grabbed their attention. 

He reached out to their minds. Once again the troopers demonstrated remarkable concentration, devoted entirely to their current tasks, yet their minds seemed otherwise blank like a droid’s. No, not true. He had known at least two droids with more personality than this, their banter ricocheting endlessly between Basic and Binary—

Kylo shut down that thought. He plucked it out and crushed it underfoot. He kept wandering, straining to place himself within the colossal design, feeling like nothing so much as a trespassing specter.

.

After a few moments of uncertainty, Kylo rapped the door with the back of his gloved hand. It slid open, revealing the General’s personal suite.

“You summoned me?”

“An invitation,” Hux amended quickly, rising from his writing desk and beckoning him inside. “Not an urgent matter of business.”

The door shut again as soon as Kylo stepped in. “Do you often indulge in such unnecessary conversation?”

Hux took a seat at a round central table, already set with cups and a metal pitcher. “You may assure the Supreme Leader that I am not distracted by my social calendar. Please, sit.”

Without thinking Kylo dropped down opposite him. “Perhaps your subordinates have little to say. Unless their silence is just for me?”

“They are eloquent enough on military matters,” Hux said, pouring out two cups of tarine tea. “Here. Please drink.”

He set the cup down in front of Kylo. Before Kylo had fully considered the command his fingers were already at the latch of his helmet—

_ do not remove your mask for anyone _

“I’ll be right back.”

Kylo shot to his feet and lumbered back out of the room, begging the Force to lead him to the nearest galley kitchen.

Several minutes later he returned with a long metal tube gripped in his fist. Hux frowned at it, and then at Kylo.

“There’s no need to stand on ceremony here,” he said with a magnanimous smile. “Take off your mask and relax.”

In that instant the conflict crystallized. Hux was strong with the Force, blindingly so. Where his mind tricks clashed with the Supreme Leader’s, they tussled for dominance, wrestling and spiraling about the battlefield of Kylo’s head.

When Kylo spoke again, he had to grit out the words. “The straw will be relaxing enough.”

“Very well, then.” With a shrug, Hux sipped his tea.

Yet concern glinted in his eye. Kylo caught onto it. It was the first fingerhold he had found, and he probed it further even as he raised his own teacup and fiddled with the straw. An image filtered out through a seam in Hux’s defenses. 

A fragile wisp of a red-haired human boy.

Too far to touch him, Kylo simply stared. The boy stood outside Hux’s walls, keeping his back painfully straight. His bones vibrated from the tension. Kylo noted the same vibration in his eyes, darting back and forth, the eyes of a fellow specter panicking outside his bounds—

Sucking a mouthful of too-hot tea through his straw, Kylo winced. The image disintegrated.

“Tell me about your stormtrooper reconditioning process,” he said upon recovering.

Hux launched into a highly technical description of hormonal manipulation and drug concoctions. Kylo nodded along, feigning comprehension for a few minutes before interrupting: “They seem like droids.”

“They aren’t. If you would like one to remove their helmet you may see for yourself—"

“They feel like droids, then,” Kylo said with more heat. “Why bother with humans if you’re going to, to stamp out the humanity?”

“They retain their creativity on the field,” Hux replied. “And in their personal lives, they are allowed to make substantive choices. I have found a limited selection of choices vastly improves loyalty.”

“What, they get to choose which kind of sludge they get for breakfast?”

“Porridge flavors, yes. And the color of their underclothes, and the arrangement of their quarters, and the skills they improve in their recreational time. They are made fully aware of the chance of advancement, a stimulus that improves performance _ far _ beyond the level of a droid.”

He uttered the last sentence with the acid of a man who had had this argument before.

“I…” Kylo’s eyes darted down to his cup and back to Hux, wavering. “I look forward to seeing this prowess in action.”

He tinted the end of the sentence with a threat, increasingly thankful for the mask.

They drank their bittersweet tea, Kylo gingerly sipping it through the straw. He grazed Hux’s walls, hoping for another chink in the shields, and retreated in disappointment.

The Force was strong in Hux, brazenly so, yet Kylo couldn’t comprehend how. Most Force-sensitives tapped into the world around them, embedding themselves deep in the Force’s grand tapestry. Kylo, Luke, even Snoke had gained their power only by reaching out to the world.

Yet Hux stood alone, a fortress in and of himself.

To test his theory, Kylo projected the loudest thoughts he could: _ I will doom you. I will set fire to your every plan. I will bring death to your doorstep and laugh as it passes through. _

Hux kept drinking, entirely unruffled. Oblivious.

Kylo cleared his throat. “Is there anything in particular you invited me for?”

He nodded. “We could be petty rivals. Snoke likely expects that, that we will get in each other’s way and hold each other down.”

“That’s possible.”

“But—” he took another dainty sip of his tea— “our cooperation would serve the First Order better. I offer you my help, to the extent that I can without infringing on my other responsibilities. Whether you take it is your choice.”

.

Kylo Ren.

He repeated the name to himself— _ your name, your name_— as he donned his armor. He dressed alone in the quiet of his quarters, which he searched twice a day for cameras. He never left them in anything other than full armor, with the mask locked tight around his face and concealed further by the heavy weave of his cowl. Every day he repeated his routine and rambled about the ship, steps clanking loud, his path ultimately aimless.

.

In hindsight, the explosion had been inevitable.

Kylo didn’t _ mean _ it. He didn’t mean any of it. He never did, yet suddenly his saber was humming in his hand and a control panel had crumpled into a smoking heap.

“Did it insult you?” Hux drawled. The general had snuck up on him at some point.

Kylo clenched his eyes shut under the mask, shoulders and back rigid with tension, and tried to remember how to breathe.

“Lord Ren—”

He whirled around. “Yes?”

“Did the control panel insult you personally?” When he received no answers, Hux shook his head. “I had heard the rumors, but this is...excessive.”

“What rumors?”

“We are at war,” he said by way of response. “This is no place for a sulking child. Do _ not _ act like one.”

The words snapped around Kylo’s limbs like cuffs. He jerked, straining against the presumptuous mind trick, only to be distracted by yet another fugitive image.

Once again the boy lingered in the distance. Curled in the fetal position, he had buried his face in his knees. Perhaps he was sulking. To Kylo the way he rocked himself— back and forth, back and forth— suggested something more.

.

Kylo gave up trying to grasp the _ Finalizer_. Instead he turned his attention to its leader.

General Brendol Hux strode about the ship with a confidence Kylo could only pretend. He hurled orders at his subordinates— usually other officers, who sat unmasked upon his bridge— with the rapidfire precision of a turbolaser. They complied with unnatural alacrity, never once expressing doubt or even confusion.

It was the finest mind trick Kylo had ever witnessed. He wondered if the Supreme Leader was aware.

.

“Good,” Snoke hummed, his hologram looming far over Kylo’s head, making him feel more like a child than usual. “You caught on more swiftly than I expected.”

“I cannot read his thoughts—” he omitted as irrelevant the phantom, a scrap of a boy who kept escaping Hux’s castle walls— “but he poses a threat to you.”

“This is why I sent you to him. A matter of inoculation, if you will.”

“I should resist him?”

“You should practice it,” Snoke said, robes rustling as he leaned back against his throne. “He will attempt to manipulate you. Treat his every word with the skepticism it deserves.”

“Why do you keep him?” Kylo asked, removing his own skepticism from his tone. “If it’s only to ensure the troopers’ loyalty, surely clones would do as well—”

“He is a beast in a gentleman’s uniform.” Snoke cut off his stammering with an abrupt flick of the hand— though merely a gesture, Kylo still winced on instinct. “But a beast’s weakness, properly manipulated, can be a sharp tool. Remember that.”

“Why am I here?”

“Because I command you to be.” Snoke’s voice took on a playful note. “Is that not reason enough?”

“You are wise, Supreme Leader.”

.

Kylo installed himself on the _ Finalizer’s _ bridge. He purposefully loomed, positioned on the edge but never out of sight. He pretended that he already understood Hux’s every command, all the while skimming the other officers’ heads to decode military jargon.

He waited for someone to notice that he had stepped out of his place. To kick him back down.

.

When Kylo Ren was merely Ben Solo, his mother had wrapped a beacon bracelet around his wrist while holding a matching gem in her own hands. 

“This bond works both ways. If we’re ever lost,” she had said, “follow this, and you can come to me if you’d like. Or you can wait, and I will come to find you.”

“Promise?”

“Of course.” She ruffled his hair, a mop of black curls he always forgot to brush at that age.

He had taken a saber to that beacon in his early days as Luke’s student. He hadn’t thought about it in years. He had slashed it out of his memory.

Yet mental walls gave way in sleep, and the beacon reappeared one night in an oddly vivid dream, wholly against Kylo’s will. Its straps were tied too tight around a wrist far below Kylo’s eyeline, an unfamiliar bony wrist that just might have been his in a childhood long forgotten.

.

The next time Hux invited him to his quarters, Kylo came armed with straws.

“I’m afraid I have no tea to offer you this time. Only a break from what to you must seem endless tedium.”

Kylo wondered if he was fishing for information— an indication that he was human, and not some more patient, long-lived species. He didn’t respond.

With a grunt, Hux handed Kylo a datapad. “We’ve captured a Resistance informant. I could use your assistance in the interrogation.”

Kylo glanced down at the information and then raised his head again. “You can’t simply order her to spill everything relevant to our purposes?”

Hux tipped his head, an acknowledgement of his own powers. “I already have. But as much as I hate to admit it, a second opinion can be useful.”

“Why are you letting me in?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your thoughts on Snoke are less than noble.” A shot in the dark, but the narrowing of Hux’s eyes suggested it was accurate. “Why indulge him on this? You think I’m that harmless?”

“To the contrary. I hope you’re more dangerous than you’ve shown, and to more targets than my control panels.”

“Then you hope to use my power.” Kylo forced a smile.

“I hope one day to stand behind your throne, as you rule the galaxy.”

“Why should I believe you’d be content, having me on the throne?”

A frown passed over Hux’s brow, darkening it with a nebulous feeling Kylo struggled to name— melancholy, perhaps. 

“You remind me,” he answered, voice uncharacteristically soft, “of someone who ought to have been here.”

.

Kylo entered the interrogation chamber. The spy lay with her eyes closed, sagging into the black chair.

“You’ve already given up?” he said in mock-disappointment.

Her eyes opened. Narrowed at him.

“Never,” she breathed, with the self-serious piousness so common among the Resistance. “You can’t snuff out hope entirely. There will always be a spark, and it will always find its kindling again.”

He snorted. “Let’s see whether you still believe that five minutes from now.”

He lifted his hand and began to prod at her mind, gently feeling his way forward towards the light— or what passed for it, in her head. Towards the Resistance. On his journey he found a whole catalogue of tips she had passed on, names of additional moles embedded within the First Order’s network. A veritable database of actionable information.

Up floated an old memory of General Organa hunched over her maps and plans. She muttered into a comlink that the Resistance had to pull out of an operation, leaving a few soldiers to the First Order’s mercies.

Kylo roared, the sound torn up and amplified by his mask. He punched the spy hard in the nose and then slashed the rest of his way forward.

“She found a chink in your armor, hm?” Hux asked once he fled the room.

“You don’t have anything you’d rather forget, General?” he retorted.

“Of course not.”

At that instant, a phantom scream pierced all of Hux’s mental shields and rang in Kylo’s head: _ please, father, nopleasewhypleaseno _

_ why? _

.

The next time Kylo’s dreams turned too vivid, rendering every line with knife-edge precision, he noticed the initial pull— the fall into another Force-user’s mind. One look verified that this was Hux’s dream.

Kylo floated like a ghost, translucent and insubstantial, wavering in Hux’s periphery. The general himself seemed not to notice him. Instead he gazed out a tall window, circular with hard black lines spidering out from the center, overlooking a world of water. Battered by an endless thunderstorm, the room shook. 

From the center rose a throne, still and grey and made of stone. With silent footsteps Kylo darted to see who had claimed it, if not the general.

A slender red-haired youth about Kylo’s age was draped over the throne. His pose was one of languid relaxation, yet there was something eerily still to it, as if he was stone himself.

Kylo’s eyes drifted up his frame. He took in long, slender legs crossed at the knees, and narrow wrists laden with gold. The hollows of his pale neck, exposed by a regal embroidered collar that dipped down to his breastbone.

Where his face should have been, there was only an incomprehensible blur. When Kylo reached forward to touch it, the whole dream faded under his fingertips, leaving only an unmistakable wistfulness.

.

The next morning Kylo admitted that his telepathic abilities might, in this one case, be less efficient than plain research. He woke up, dressed in his pristine black robes, and marched directly to the archives. There he struck the ship’s recordkeeper with a barrage of queries, folding a request for Brendol Hux’s personal files into the stack. 

They listed a wife. Kylo unearthed an old picture of Hux as a young redhead officer beside a stout olive-skinned brunette, both posing on their estate on Arkanis. It was a poor image, blurred by rain. A quick look into Arkanis’s meteorology suggested that rain was not unusual there.

The couple was marked as childless. Kylo nearly gave up upon discovering that, but the panic in the phantom boy’s eyes motivated him to keep looking.

_ Armitage Hux. _

The name first appeared on Imperial training rosters, for the last seven years when there still _ were _ Imperial training rosters. Kylo tracked him from Arkanis to the Battle of Jakku, where his name was listed on a Star Destroyer log just above Brendol’s. Yet when Brendol moved camp once again, relocating from Jakku to the Unknown Regions to start the First Order, Armitage Hux disappeared.

_ Armitage Hux_.

Kylo’s stare snagged on that name. He rolled it on his tongue, acquainting himself with it, guessing at the pronunciation. It clogged his throat with inconvenient feelings.

.

The next invitation came quickly.

“You lost your son,” Kylo said without preamble, the second Hux’s door had sealed.

“He died,” he corrected, eyes shimmering between blinks. “At the Battle of Jakku.”

“How did you handle the loss?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Research. The Dark Side gains strength from loss and the rage that ensues. Have you taken revenge on his killer, or are you still trying?”

“Neither.” Hux quirked an eyebrow. “I don’t think of Armitage.”

Kylo tilted his head. “Never?”

“Not unless a protege of the Dark Side starts asking about him,” he scoffed. “What about you, Lord Ren? What have you lost?”

Now a scene rose unbidden from Kylo’s own traitorous head. A small boy with unruly black curls squirming in his mother’s lap, whispering strategy ideas to her as they tried to plot a winning strategy for a flickering game of Dejarik—

“I’ve lost enough.” 

.

Kylo envied Hux his walls. They concealed nearly everything, everything but one wayward child’s ghost.

Kylo had spent years containing his feelings, bottling them up at his parents’ command and then at Luke’s. Even Snoke demanded that he screw the cap on tight, except in those rare moments when he required the full thrust of the Dark Side. It never worked, not fully.

And so he pursed his lips and tried without success to will down the tears. They were impossible to quell in the privacy of his own quarters, now that he had flung the helmet to one side and his cowl to the other. He staggered back against the wall, breathing hard.

He felt sand underfoot as a young boy played in Chandrila’s oceans, flinging seawater into his father’s face with the Force, both laughing until their sides split, until Han Solo begged for his mercy.

.

“You’d like to forget the past?” Snoke mocked, flinging Kylo’s words back in his face like so much sand. “Forget it?”

Kylo kept his head bowed low, not daring to rise. Even over hologram Snoke could knock him unconscious. Could hurl the contents of the room at his head. Could shatter him until even Kylo Ren was dead.

“Forgetfulness is the path of the weak,” Snoke seethed. “The weak and the dishonest and the guilty. Would you forget how your family abandoned you? Would you forget your quest for justice?”

“No, but—”

“Do you imagine anything less than constant reminders can keep Ben Solo away? Reminders of his weakness, his blind faith, how the light _ failed him— _”

“Ben Solo is dead,” Kylo snarled, hot breath catching in his mask.

Ben Solo was dead. He had killed him.

In the ensuing silence, he dared snatch a upward glance. Snoke had retreated into the back of his throne, shadows covering his features. He pressed his knobbly fingers together in contemplation.

“If only,” he said at last, voice crackling with rue, “we were so lucky.”

.

Kylo lifted his hand and _ pressed_. Keenly aware of Hux’s gaze hot on his back, he stopped a blaster bolt in midair.

With the other he ignited his saber and gave it a whirl, for one second inhaling the scent of terror, real and raw _ terror_, in the minds of his victims.

Smugglers. A whole ring of them, funneling parts and weapons straight to the Resistance, wearing their helmets and masks as if those could hide their impending deaths. As if a mask could conceal them from _ him_.

He slaughtered them, gaining strength with every spark his saber threw off. He imagined Han Solo’s smirk under each and every helmet. He seared every heart in half, high on righteous fury even as the Force whispered his father was a hundred parsecs away.

.

By the time Kylo returned to his room, his cloak had lost a flap, and a tear in his sleeve still smoldered from a plasma bolt. A new suit of armor was already standing in the middle of the room. He tried ripping his old one off in a fit of pique, only to find that all his rage had deserted him.

He resigned himself to undressing slowly, newly drained of power. Every time he pressed too far into the Dark Side, this precise lethargy crept into his bones— a dissonance, a sorrow for something he had lost along the way. Every time before, he had explained it to himself as a natural biological reaction, the unavoidable letdown after a human adrenaline high. 

When he at last collapsed into bed, a dream of his own stole over him.

Kylo recognized the spiraling windows from Hux’s dream. Yet the world of water had been replaced by sun-scorched badlands, and the thunder by a howling desert storm. It lashed the window with sand.

The throne was gone. Instead the boy— a young boy, perhaps ten or twelve— stood at the window, nose pressed to glass. His eyes were fixed on the horizon in front of him, though two moons hung luminous above. Slowly Kylo stole up to him.

“Armitage Hux?”

The name came out gravelly and twisted. Kylo had his mask on.

He removed it and tried again. “Armitage?”

The boy snapped his face around to meet his stare. Suddenly Kylo saw clearly the sharp angles of his face and the maelstrom barely contained in misty gray-green eyes. He gazed back down at that odd little moon-kissed face and swayed like a tree struck by lightning, rendered inexplicably breathless.

.

Hux’s defenses were near-impenetrable in the light of day, but at night Kylo could sometimes stumble into his dreams. Growing bolder, he stayed awake hours after his schedule dictated he should, aiming to outlast the general. He forced his limbs into stillness and forced his mind into the liminal grey of meditation.

At last Hux fell asleep, and Kylo did what he had always done best. He slunk in where he wasn’t wanted.

He materialized on a ship— a Destroyer, with old-fashioned displays and scuffed floors that didn’t match the _ Finalizer_. Alarms blared all around, and a turbolaser thundered in the distance, with an unfamiliar lull between the shots in each volley. A stormtrooper dashed up to Kylo and then _ through _ him, hurrying down the hallway.

“Stay here.” A muffled voice carried from an adjacent room. “You _ will not _ leave this room until I return.”

Brendol Hux strode out of that room, the doors sealing again before Kylo could get a glimpse inside. When he walked up to the doors, they didn’t seem to register his presence, and so he gave up and followed Hux instead. According to his insignia Hux was no general yet, and the First Order’s symbol was nowhere to be seen. 

These were still Imperial days.

Hux didn’t seem to notice as Kylo stormed after him, passing through other troopers like they were only air. He had no thought to spare, it seemed, not when there were orders to bark and Rebellion ships to incinerate. Kylo followed him all the way to the bridge, where the windows overlooked two moons and a planet of nothing but sand.

Jakku.

Hux flitted away once again, called to repair efforts on the ship’s starboard edge. Kylo stayed on the bridge. Outside the glass ships careened about the sky, X-wings and TIE-fighters dancing their strange duets, and plasma bolts streaked back and forth. The occasional missile darted into the chaos, locked in on its target, whirling closer and closer—

The next Destroyer over fired a homing missile at a Rebellion bomber. It locked in loyally on its target; Kylo could see this clearly from the arc of its path. Then Hux’s own ship dispatched the bomber quickly with a shot of a laser.

The missile jittered in that instant where its target went up in flames. Suddenly without an anchor, it wavered. Then it locked onto a new path, a straight line.

Aimed for the dead center of Hux’s ship.

Kylo flung himself out of the way too late. A heartbeat later he was flung from the dream, sent plummeting through an endless black void. In the distance he imagined an escape pod spiraling down with him.

.

“What the _ hell _ was that?”

Hux’s calm couldn’t extend forever. Finally Kylo had pushed him to open anger.

“A Resistance ambush,” Kylo replied. 

Even the gravitas of his voice filter couldn’t make that sound less obnoxious, and Hux outright rolled his eyes. “Their flagship. Their General’s _ flagship_, and you stood on the bridge and let it drift on by.”

“Your lieutenant coordinated a response, I did not presume to interfere—”

“You have a TIE fighter,” Hux spat, “the best of the line. A toy tricked out to exactly your specifications, with your missile launchers and a console so warped nobody else can touch it without roasting themselves, and you _ didn’t think to get in it_.”

“I was preoccupied by matters of the Force,” Kylo retorted.

Hux scoffed, refusing to dignify such a blatant lie with a response, and Kylo refused to expend energy convincing him otherwise. 

“Why were they here at all?” Hux exclaimed. “They left nearly as fast as they came, like it was matter of reconnaissance, but what recon trip could possibly require the General’s own flagship—” 

“Perhaps it was a feint to distract you from something else.”

“If so, then their strategy has gotten less logical since Imperial days, a feat I hardly thought possible—”

Kylo tuned out Hux’s critique of the Resistance’s tactics— chaotic, absurd, successful only through sheer guts and luck—and devoted himself to holding onto the single, incontrovertible truth that parents lie.

.

Kylo rather suspected that his armor was single-handedly keeping him upright and on his feet by the time his shift was over. The second he removed it, he was in danger of collapsing into a heap, never to stand again. So he skipped his designated rest period and stayed fully dressed, patrolling the _ Finalizer _ as if he wasn’t the only trespasser out of place. Several floors above him Hux was still huddled over his charts, conferring with ten other top officials to untangle the Resistance’s new secret plot to ruin them. There must have been a secret agenda, Hux reasoned. Surely the Resistance would never expose their fleet and their General to attack, only to run away a few minutes later without doing anything other than fire in self-defense.

Kylo stalked the _ Finalizer’s _ halls, reeling from the real attack. Through the Force his mother had grabbed him and flung a message in his face, a sustained assault that no one else on the ship was likely to notice. That none of them would have understood, even if they had sensed it.

The image of a beacon had floated up, sea-blue and solid, gem still shining in General Organa’s hands.

.

“So it’s another Death Star?”

Hux inhaled deep, as if willing himself not to strike Kylo down on the spot. Kylo almost wished he’d try.

“Where the Death Star was the size of a moon, Starkiller will use an entire planet,” he explained. “It functions at far larger distances using the newest advances in hyperspace tunneling, and—”

“And it’s a Death Star, but bigger.”

Hux closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “If that is how you wish to understand it.”

“And you will turn it on the Republic,” Kylo said slowly.

“We have to let them know we aren’t to be trifled with.”

“What lucky system are you targeting?”

“The Chandrila system.”

Kylo froze.

“Do you have any thoughts on the matter?” Hux prompted.

Kylo swallowed hard. When he spoke again, his voice was durasteel: “Do not dwell on sentiment.”

“Excuse me?”

“What other explanation is there?”

“The Concordance was signed on Chandrila, the Empire _ fell _on Chandrila, there is no better symbolism for our revenge—”

“Exactly,” Kylo spat. “Symbolism.”

“What target would you suggest, hm?”

What could he suggest? Jakku came to mind, the setting of the Empire’s final battle and a sore spot for Hux, but Kylo dismissed it. Even if Jakku blew up, nobody would care. With increasing desperation Kylo grabbed at the names of every relevant system he knew, only to reject each as too populated, too precious—

“Hosnia would do,” Hux muttered. “The Republic cannot function without its capital.”

“Perfect,” Kylo said before he could stop himself.

Hux gave him a tense nod and then sauntered away. His black gaberwool coat whirled about him, chilling and impenetrable.

.

“Your conviction wavers.”

“Why—”

“You let Organa go free. Now you shield your home planet from its well-deserved death. What next, you walk into the Resistance and declare yourself their savior?”

Reaching out from across the galaxy, Snoke slammed Kylo into the floor.

“You have too much of the light’s compassion in you, young Solo.”

Kylo pushed himself up, back into a kneeling pose. “I can do what needs to be done.”

“Can you?” Snoke’s lips pursed, drawing the hollow of his left cheek tight. “I wonder if you’ve forgotten the victory you are destined for.”

“No, I swear it…”

“Imagine it, then,” he demanded. “Savor it. Imagine Han Solo falling under the strength of nothing other than your rage!”

Kylo pictured it with the ease that comes from practice. Yet where once he would brim over with triumph at the thought, he could only summon a vague disappointment. He glanced up and found Snoke’s face twisting with disdain, or worse.

But Snoke’s telepathy was imperfect, and it would surely weaken with distance and a further lack of eye contact. It would report Kylo’s emotions while blurring all the details, and so he cast his eyes down and cast around for another viable image. He lit on one almost instantly: General Brendol Hux, face frozen in horror, gaberwool coat slashed to ribbons and left smoking.

A perverse, vengeful laugh bubbled up to Kylo’s mouth. Drumming his fingers on the arm of his throne, Snoke responded with a hum of satisfaction.

.

Kylo had been accused of many sins in his lifetime. An excess of compassion had never been one of them.

Yet as he paced his quarters and contemplated Snoke’s claim, he found a sliver of truth in it. Somehow a sliver of light had crept upon him— or opened within him, he couldn’t tell. A fissure now marked his armor.

Compassion. Fondness. These were explosives, to be detonated in others, to be kept as far from oneself as possible. Kylo sought out the inception of his weakness, fully prepared to poison it at the root. If Han Solo had inspired this change of heart, or the grand General Organa, Kylo would slice open the old wounds from their abandonment and salt them and gain strength from the pain. If it was Luke, reaching across the galaxy to once again “fix” his head, Kylo would relive that particular betrayal in all its bloody glory. He would remember how Luke had crept up with his saber lit while Ben Solo lay sleeping, he would renew his vows of vengeance and burn his way to Luke’s doorstep—

Kylo’s search dropped him before slivers, glimpses of a redhead boy who trembled outside Brendol Hux’s walls. A sniveling child. Pitiful. Long since dead.

No matter how Kylo looked at it, Armitage Hux had done Kylo no wrong.

.

Now that Kylo had noticed the light, it haunted him everywhere. In the concern that flared each time he passed a trooper and found their mind wiped blank. In the pity that tore at him when he embarked on missions that would end in death. In the pull that drew him into Hux’s dreams time and time again.

Hux was only vulnerable where his son was concerned, and so Kylo could only enter dreams of Armitage. He was surprised how many of Hux’s dreams were thus haunted. Even when Hux dreamed of the Order, of the present and of futures obviously out of his son’s reach, Armitage’s misty-eyed ghost straggled behind him.

Kylo followed Armitage.

.

Armitage slipped into Kylo’s own dreams.

Kylo would be mid-slaughter, in the middle of a twirl of his saber, and he would catch a flash of red hair in his periphery. The rest would dissolve away and leave the two of them.

Whenever Kylo remembered to check, his mask had always disappeared, so he stared bare-faced down at Armitage Hux. Sometimes Armitage still seemed the statue of his father’s dreams, marmoreal skin and an expression set in stone. He seemed unapproachable as if separated from Kylo by a veil.

The veil fell away the closer Kylo looked. In Kylo’s dreams, the boy was on the brink of tears.

For years Kylo simply watched him. Sometimes he spoke and received no answer; Armitage seemed to be nothing if not silent. In silence they stood, each bearing witness to the other.

For years he simply watched Armitage’s graceful resignation, watched him wash his cheeks with tears, until at last Kylo mustered the courage to reach out. His hand darted forth, and he half-expected Armitage to flinch or flee or simply shatter under his touch.

Instead he felt Armitage’s cheek, soft, dewy and surprisingly solid.

.

When Kylo awoke, his own pillow had dampened with tears.

.

For years Kylo had felt no other real flicker of life on the _ Finalizer_, excepting Hux and the occasional rebel prisoner. The closest he had found was his own rage— a snarling monster that seemed wholly split from him at times— and the lingering phantom of Armitage Hux. Wrapped up in his own melancholia, Kylo missed the candle lit in the mind of one TIE fighter pilot. He missed that flame, warm and disobedient and dangerous, until it was nearly too late to save it.

“You had the best pilot in the Resistance in your sights,” bellowed Hux in an interrogation chamber, roused to a frenzy Kylo had thought him incapable of, “and yet you did not shoot!”

The TIE pilot flinched.

“Take off that ridiculous helmet.”

After a second, the pilot removed his gleaming black mask. He revealed warm brown eyes, currently darting back and forth between Hux and Kylo. Without the mask, he became even more vulnerable to telepathic invasion.

“Tell me,” Hux commanded, the Force crackling around him, “why didn’t you shoot?”

“I. I don’t know.”

Hux recoiled. “Did you fail to hear my order, when I told you to press the trigger?”

“No, I heard it, I just. Just.”

“Disobeyed my order,” Hux breathed. Standing against the wall behind him, Kylo couldn’t glimpse his face, but in the general’s voice was clear disbelief.

Both Kylo and the pilot flinched as Hux’s arm snapped up. His palm was open. Ready to strike.

“Don’t!” Kylo’s hand jerked up just in time, freezing Hux’s arm in place with the Force.

Up came an image of Armitage flinching from a blow just like this one, pale skin already mottled by bruises.

“Let me go,” Hux murmured with an eerie calm.

The words pressed down hard around Kylo’s throat. He released his grip.

“So,” the general said, briefly favoring him with a glance, “only one of us is allowed to engage in wanton destruction?”

Kylo held onto the vision. In Armitage’s thin-boned face, he spotted a trace of something feral before it was slapped away. As if for a moment he contemplated biting back.

Kylo held onto it too long, stunned.

Hux whirled about to face him. “Get out.”

The Force thrust Kylo out of Hux’s head even as he was compelled to physically exit the room, reduced to another droid in the general’s collection.

.

Hux left executions to his troopers, taking the opportunity to more thoroughly acclimatize them to violence. Kylo counted on this. When Hux left the interrogation room, Kylo swept back in. Already a group of other troopers had gathered around the pilot. He lay limp against the chair, face bloodied. His eyes were still open and luminous with pain.

Kylo waved one hand, and he fell unconscious.

“I’ve killed him,” Kylo said. “Your task is complete.”

The other troopers turned their dim eyes on him.

“You have fulfilled your orders,” he said, trying again.

Nonetheless one raised a blaster, the muzzle a few inches from the pilot’s chest, and shot it. Blood bloomed on his torso.

“There,” Kylo said. “Now he must be dead. I congratulate you on your thoroughness.”

“Thank you,” intoned the shooter.

“Go.”

They heeded his dismissal. Once they were gone, Kylo unclenched his jaw, gasping at the pain of absorbing the brunt of the plasma bolt. A quick check verified that the pilot’s wound was a shallow one. Treatable.

Kylo burst into action. He stalked through the _ Finalizer_, easily slinging the pilot over his shoulder, dancing around other troopers and the cameras strewn about the ship. He stashed him in a closet, jaunted to the medical bay, and returned with enough bacta to heal the wound. While it took effect, he made a quick trip to the logistical center of the ship and identified someone who wouldn’t be missed.

When he returned, he pulled the pilot back to wakefulness. He blinked at Kylo blearily.

“Your name,” Kylo said in the stifling space of the closet, “is FN-2187.”

“I— I’m in the navy, my designation is TN-”

“Your name is FN-2187. Your background is in sanitation; you think you’re the best janitor the First Order’s ever had. You’re up for a transfer off this ghost ship.”

The pilot scrunched up his face. “I’m supposed to be dead.”

“Forget that. Your name is FN-2187.”

“Why are you— why are _ you _ helping me?”

“They’ll recondition you once you arrive. I doubt it’ll work, but try to hold onto it.”

“Onto _ what_?” the pilot protested in abject confusion.

“That light.”

The pilot’s eyes widened in recognition. He flooded Kylo’s mind with the blaze of sunlight, filtered through a lace of green leaves.

“Change into regular armor. Then get to the transfer center, fast.”

Kylo stormed back out of the closet before the pilot could start jabbering again. He sought out the real FN-2187, dutifully hunched over his mop and bucket, and eliminated him.

.

Snoke transferred Kylo to Starkiller Base.

Where Kylo had been concerned by the unnatural order of the _ Finalizer_, Starkiller’s well-organized silence suffocated him outright. Systematically, on schedule, Hux was stripping the whole planet of life. The rich veins of kyber crystal had been mined for weaponry until Kylo could barely hear their hum. The millions of troopers manning the base had been hand-picked for obedience. They were further gone than the crystals.

The planet’s surface was forested by evergreens that had withstood millennia of endless snow. Now, they were in the way of Hux’s architectural design.

“Would you care to do the honors?” Hux offered him a small box with a button on the end.

Kylo shook his head. “Starkiller’s _ your _ child.”

“That it is.”

With no further ceremony, Hux pressed the detonator, and a thousand acres of evergreens went up in flames.

They shared this, Hux and Snoke. They shared this taste for fire. Kylo only remembered it, tasted it like ash on his tongue. 

.

In Starkiller’s silence, in the tomblike hollow of a planet mourning itself, even Armitage abandoned him. Hux’s dreams focused solely on strategy, no dead children or lurking Darksiders permitted.

Instead Kylo lay awake every night thinking of Chandrilan funerals, how mourners would sew a shroud for the dead. Every night a mourner would weave row after row in the tapestry, and every night they would rip out the stitches, as long as the memories of the deceased still tore them apart. The cycle would continue, tearing, repairing, until finally their grief found resolution.

.

Kylo tried to reach out to the living. He tried striking up conversations with Starkiller’s officers, and they spoke vivaciously enough on strategic matters, regaling him with endless explanations of weaponry that went right over his head. Some would tell him of their ambitions, the ranks they thought they might achieve within the Order one day. He pressed for something, any stray thought that had escaped Brendol Hux’s net, a mention of a family or a favorite story or a dream that wasn’t innately dedicated to the advancement of the First Order. He found nothing.

.

Every night he dreamed of beacons.

At Snoke’s orders he studied harder than ever, but he opted to move his endurance training above ground. He improved his stamina on the snow-covered, rocky terrain of the parts of the planet which hadn’t yet been burned to a crisp. In those moments, sprinting with the stars above him, an honest chill creeping through even his layers of armor, he liked to pretend that he could escape his fate. That he hadn’t been buried alive. That he was still free.

.

“You’ll leave Pryde stranded?” Kylo exclaimed, pacing one of Starkiller’s control rooms.

Hux switched off his comlink with a nod. “A necessary sacrifice.”

“Dispatch a team now, the odds are we could save that ship.”

“His ship is too old to be worth saving.”

“You put him on that ship, against his protests!”

“Why such loyalty to Pryde?”

“Why such disloyalty to Pryde?” Kylo shot back— not his finest retort, but it would have to do. “I’ve seen his head. He’s loyal as they come, has been since Imperial times, and you didn’t even have to recondition him for it.”

Hux regarded him for a moment with a lift of an eyebrow. Then he pivoted and strode out of the room.

“What?” Kylo called down the hallway, not caring how many troopers were within earshot. “You don’t control him, so he has to go?”

“A necessary sacrifice,” he repeated, not even looking back, and suddenly Kylo knew how Armitage Hux died.

.

Armitage returned.

The windows were gone. The throne was gone. All that remained in Kylo’s dream was a red-haired boy with his head tucked down into his knees, curled up in the desert in the middle of a sandstorm. Behind him smoked the wreckage of a crashed escape pod.

“Hey, Armitage.”

Kylo could barely hear himself over the gales whipping his face with sand, carrying his voice away.

“Armitage!” 

Kylo tried to tug him up onto his feet, but Armitage only collapsed in on himself again, teetering on fragile limbs thin as needles. Yet Kylo couldn’t carry the boy himself, not when all the winds of Jakku were forcing him down too.

“Come on, Armitage. Come on.”

Kylo grabbed him by the hand and pulled, clasping his forearm and feeling Armitage’s fingers folding around his own. But Armitage was dead weight. 

Kylo was dead weight.

He knelt down beside Armitage, arms still woven together, and fell into the soft bed of sand, and let the desert bury them both.

.

Kylo awoke in an empty room on an empty planet.

_ Stay here_, Brendol Hux had ordered many years ago within an Imperial Star Destroyer. _ You will not leave. _

Spooked by the impact of a wayward missile, Armitage nonetheless tried to escape. He died for that disobedience.

.

The mask he couldn’t hurt, not without disobeying Snoke, and so Kylo threw it aside and pulled the rest of his impeccable, useless armor out. In the silence of his own quarters he ignited his saber, relishing its unpredictable hum.

Wanton destruction still held its charms.

.

He stalked out in plainclothes and a black cloak— a lighter and therefore more dramatic garment than Hux’s gaberwool coats. When he returned, he found his armor waiting in his closet. Perhaps the suit had been repaired. Perhaps it was a perfect replica, one in a line of millions.

.

“Tell me, why is Starkiller running behind schedule? Hux lays the blame with his suppliers.”

“He is an excellent liar,” Kylo answered. He kept his mask on and his posture neutral, disrupting Snoke’s telepathy as thoroughly as he could.

“You disagree with his assessment?”

“Hux’s wounds are self-inflicted. He has lulled his engineers so well they might as well be droids. They don’t ask questions, they don’t raise alarms.”

“And you take issue with this?”

“Only because it causes issues,” Kylo said, drawing on the facts that he had against his will absorbed from the officers. “And delays, as they patch mistakes a freer team would have never made in the first place.”

“Fascinating. You accuse him of permitting too little freedom. He claims I allow too much—” Snoke shifted in his seat, the tight-knit threads of his robe shimmering blue over the hologram-- “where you are concerned.”

Kylo pressed his lips together. “I stay out of his way. Isn’t that what he wants?”

“He wants an equal partner in ruling the galaxy—”

“Not an equal one,” he muttered under his breath.

“— not a mewling child who only destroys the closest thing at hand, when there are planets to burn!”

“I do not deserve—”

“Deserve?” bellowed Snoke. “And what do you think you _ deserve_, Kylo Ren?” 

He lifted his hand, and Kylo sucked in half an inhale before the telltale grip closed around his throat.

“What did your father think you deserved, when you were still an innocent child with no blood on your hands?” 

For a moment, Kylo pried the phantom hand off his throat, stealing a full breath.

“Han Solo feared you, and envied you, and he thought it right to _ abandon _ you. To leave you for your uncle to kill. His only mistake—” he roared so loud the speakers crumbled into static— “was not having the strength or foresight to do the job himself!”

Kylo stole another beath. He stayed silent and let the rage creep back in just when Snoke would expect. Snoke’s telepathy was imperfect.

Snoke missed the way Kylo’s fury aimed not at Han Solo but at Brendol Hux.

He missed the malfunction of a missile, curving ever so slightly off its intended path.

.

Desperate to sleep, Kylo threw his armor back on and roamed Starkiller’s indistinguishable halls. He barreled down perilous catwalks, searching for any sign of life. He chased flashes of red hair around corners. He tried to outrun the metallic roar of his own footsteps, running until he was hopelessly lost in the labyrinth, alone with no other monster in sight.

.

“Bacta is not such a bountiful resource that we can afford to spend it all on your self-inflicted wounds.”

Warily, Kylo pried his eyes open. He was alone in a medbay room. Hux’s voice crackled from a comlink at the foot of his bed.

“I fell off a walkway,” Kylo said. “On accident. It could happen to anyone, with your lack of safety railings.”

“Anyone else,” Hux snapped, “would have had the decency to die.”

“Who found me?”

“A sentry droid.”

“Of course,” Kylo mumbled.

“And all your care has been handled privately by droids as well. The Supreme Leader put a fine point on it. As if...”

“As if?”

“Forget that.”

“No,” Kylo challenged, “I don’t think I will.”

“As if you’re anything more than a malfunctioning turbolaser, as likely to blow up in our faces as shoot the enemy.”

“What a pity,” he responded, for the first time out-enunciating Hux, “that I didn’t strand myself on a desert planet so you could abandon me and cry a decade of fake tears over a genuinely self-inflicted wound, as if you felt sorry about any of it!”

“Armitage?”

Kylo blinked in confusion.

“Armitage, is that you?”

Kylo gasped in silence.

“No,” Hux finally murmured, speaking mostly to himself. “No, he’s dead. Even before Jakku he was thin as a slip of paper and just as useless. He wouldn’t have survived the day.”

Kylo nodded. “I regret to inform you I’m a different ghost.”

He then gracefully ended the conversation by hurling his comlink into the wall.

.

Every day Starkiller rose.

Kylo lingered too long in his quarters, undressed. He had nowhere to go, since Hux had revoked his access to most of the base. He had nowhere to be either, as Hux had emptied his schedule. No one here was likely to miss him.

He toyed with the hilt of his saber, thumb grazing the activation switch. Perhaps no one would miss him.

He thought then of a boy thin as paper who likely once thought the same thing, and he placed his saber back on his nightstand.

.

Every morning the sun rose, oblivious to its fated doom. Kylo dreamed of sunlight and desert storms and awoke choking, drowning in tears. 

.

With what fire he had left Kylo hunted for Luke, to learn which rock his uncle had hid himself under. Where once he had intended to snuff Luke out, now he toyed with the idea of asking to move in with him. To move somewhere where neither Snoke with his telepathy nor Hux with his precious new hyperspace tracking would find him.

“We should go to Jakku,” Kylo informed Hux. “There’s a piece of the map there.”

“Why Jakku?” he demanded. “Why not any of the other five leads you’ve failed to follow?”

“No time like the present to start facing your regrets,” Kylo taunted.

Right on cue Kylo reached out to Hux’s head and plucked out an image of two beacons, just like the pair he and his mother once shared. Yet while the exteriors were identical, Kylo identified a single difference in function: the link between Hux’s beacons was one-sided. Only one beacon gave out data, and only one received it.

Kylo elicited a promise of assistance— the _ Finalizer _ and Hux’s own oversight, which felt like nothing so much as an overbearing parent’s supervision— and tore out of the meeting. He and Hux met again only minutes later.

“Who gave you permission to be here?” Hux barked, marching through the doors to his own quarters.

A whirlwind had ripped through the general’s room, secret panels thrown open, hidden weapons strewn about the floor. Kylo stood at the eye of the storm, swaying on his feet. He clenched his glove tight around a bracelet with a lightless gem at the center.

“No need to worry,” Kylo said, voice taut with ugly humor. “There’s no signal from the other side. You couldn’t pay your last respects to Armitage even if you cared to.”

“You know nothing of what I care for—”

Before Kylo knew it, his lightsaber was ignited in his hand.

Hux's eyes widened. “Don’t hurt me.”

Under his mask, Kylo’s lips began to tremble. Hux was strong in the Force, blindingly so, but Kylo might have once been able to match him. Once a brazen, blazing rage had fueled him, and once again he called it to him. 

The dark side responded with silence. 

Kylo sought his rage, and with one final gasp it burned itself out, withering away like smoke in the wind. 

He powered off his saber, thrust the dead beacon against Hux’s chest, and fled.

.

Starkiller rose, and Kylo collapsed.

Under pressure from Hux Kylo collapsed and delayed the trip to Jakku, chasing every other lead first until they had no choice but to approach the galaxy’s junkyard. Armitage Hux’s graveyard. 

Kylo drowned in grief with nowhere to put it. He tried to resign himself to a life underwater, where he existed only to execute the revenge Snoke claimed he wanted. Lying awake in the dead of night he flirted with rebellion, with rewiring Hux’s brainwashed troopers and liberating them in one grand mutiny. But he was his father’s son in more ways than one. All he could do was hotwire their heads— shoot the control panel and hope for the best. He knew the result before he tried it. Far from freeing his targets, he’d only shatter them forever.

He prayed to his grandfather’s helmet and was answered with the silence of the dead.

After returning from one more failed mission for the map, Kylo stalked inside his quarters and hurled aside his mask without even checking for cameras. He ripped off his armor with even less care than usual, flinging the garments about his room. The cowl he took back up, pulling it to him with the Force, and with the Force he ripped off the hem, leaving its edge frayed and uneven. Threads hung long and ragged off the end.

With his comlink he screamed for a trooper to bring him a needle and thread.

And so he began to sew. He faced down his grief and sewed a shroud for a dead boy lost in Jakku’s deserts. 

He sewed for a dead boy splashing in the Chandrila sea.

.

It became a nightly endeavor. Every night he carefully mended the cowl’s tattered edge, and every night he ripped the stitches out again. In the clanging roil of his mind, he mourned for two dead boys and waited for his grief to resolve itself.

Though it softened over time, it refused to disappear. Instead the core of his sorrow spooled small and stubborn in his chest, bound up with something he should have surrendered long ago, a feeling he couldn’t name aloud or rationally explain.

Hope.

.

Kylo’s Upsilon-class shuttle glided smoothly down to the surface Jakku. Already the Order’s soldiers had set the small village ablaze in a frenzy of smoking, needless destruction. He strode out, torn cowl fluttering in the desert breeze, and the troopers brought Lor San Tekka before him.

“You know what I’ve come for,” Kylo said without preamble.

“I know where you come from, before you called yourself Kylo Ren.”

It was a practiced skill, keeping his voice steady as his chin quivered under the mask.

“The map to Luke. We know you’ve found it, and now you’re going to give it to the First Order.”

“The First Order rose from the dark side,” he warned. “You did not.”

He wished for a retort and had none. Instead Kylo reached out with one hand, efficiently skimming the surface of his mind.

“You gave it to a Resistance pilot,” he deduced. “To…”

Right on cue, said pilot shot at him. Kylo froze him and the bullet both, and with a flick of his free hand he sent Lor San Tekka tumbling into the sand unconscious.

He turned his full attention to the pilot. When his troopers searched the man and found nothing, Kylo reached straight into his head, hoping for an easy answer. He got airtight resistance. 

“Put him onboard.” He whirled away, back towards his ship.

“Sir, the villagers?”

“Not worth our time. Leave them.”

The forces pulled into an orderly retreat, and yet something stopped Kylo in place. Among the raging fires, a gentle light flickered.

A trooper was staring at him. Kylo probed slightly and recognized him as the TIE-pilot-turned-sanitation-worker. A slightly deeper look revealed that he had been sent back from Starkiller Base for being a less than competent janitor. Kylo snapped his gaze away and hurried onto the ship, wondering how soon he’d need to rescue him again.

His speculation proved unnecessary. In an act of defiance that should have failed and nonetheless worked spectacularly, FN-2187 broke himself and the Resistance pilot out of the First Order. Within an hour their rebellion sent the _ Finalizer_’s hangar up in flames and pushed Hux into a miniature panic.

“Dameron had help,” he fumed as the alarms blared, “from one of our own. We’re checking the registers now to identify which stormtrooper it was.”

Kylo snorted under his breath. 

“I’m curious to know how this was possible,” he added.

Kylo stayed quiet.

He stood back and watched Hux run in circles, straining to put out an increasingly ridiculous chain of fires that could have come right out of Han Solo’s old war stories. Watching Hux squirm was entertaining, but Kylo reminded himself of the truth: there was no defeating the First Order in the long run.

The gentle light lingered, and whispered it was not so.

Kylo lurked behind Hux, a silent, motionless phantom. There he stayed until a lieutenant approached them both with obvious trepidation.

“Sirs? We were unable to acquire the droid on Jakku.”

“Why not?” Hux instantly demanded.

“It escaped capture aboard a stolen quadrijet transfer spacetug.”

“The droid stole a quadjumper?” Kylo asked, smirking into his mask.

“Not exactly, sir. It had help. We have no confirmation, but it may have been helped by a girl—”

“What girl?” Kylo interrupted.

“I— I don’t know, exactly.”

Kylo didn’t know, and yet something ancient flared in him. A call. A bone-deep recognition. 

“They may have also— and we are still attempting to confirm this— been helped by a boy.”

Hux shot out of his chair. “What boy?”

He thundered out the words, panic clear on his face, quickly grabbed back under control as he scrambled to reassure himself. Nothing survived on Jakku. What was lost stayed lost. Ghosts didn’t come back from the dead.

A rogue spark caught on kindling, and a forest went up in flames.

Under his mask, Ben Solo smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> For Rey and Armitage Hux's adventures on Jakku, please see the previous story.


End file.
